Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Matthew 6:9-13 | Date: February 1, 2026 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Our Priority in Prayer

Matthew chapter 6. These prayer services, we have been working our way through the Lord’s Prayer. And I’ll take the time to read again verses 9 through 13. “Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

We have been looking through this prayer; we have noticed that there’s basically two sections. There’s the opening address, “Our Father,” and then there’s six areas of petition, again divided into two. We have three areas of petition pertaining to God and his concerns, and then now beginning with this evening, verse 11, three petitions specifically for our own concerns.

Let me read you something here from John R. W. Stott, his little commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. It’s entitled, wonderfully, Christian Counterculture. He writes here in this section: “It is comparatively easy to repeat the words of the Lord’s Prayer like a parrot. To pray them with sincerity, however, has revolutionary implications, for it expresses the priorities of a Christian. We are constantly under pressure to conform to the self-centeredness of secular culture. When that happens, we become concerned about our own little name, our own little empire, our own little silly will. But in the Christian counterculture, our top priority is not our name, our kingdom, and our will, but God’s. Whether we can pray these petitions with integrity is a searching test of the reality and depth of our Christian profession.”

Well, what he’s dealing with here, then, is the order of these petitions. I’ve mentioned that, I think, each time, that it begins with these petitions which pertain to God, and then it comes to these petitions that pertain to our concerns. Now this is not a model that you have to follow in every prayer or anything like that. It does give us, though, the categories to pray in.

And when you have—when you take the time at home to pray on your own—I suggest to follow this. You think first: what matters most to God? And that’s the ordering that he gives us with these. His name: let your name be sanctified in the earth. His kingdom: your kingdom come. His will: let your will be done in earth as it is in heaven. So make these categories the primary categories of your prayer first. And then we can move on to others. But having sorted out those priorities, we must go on—and I’m gonna mention this a little bit further on—that it is not impious to have prayer requests that concern us and address our own concerns.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

And that is verses 11 through 13. And the first one of these is verse 11: “Give us this day our daily bread.” This expression “daily bread” actually appears here only in the extant Greek literature we have from that period. And there’s been some discussion exactly what does it mean—give us today’s bread, give us tomorrow’s bread?

I think the sense of it is pretty clear. Give us what we need today. You want to say, well, it pertains to tomorrow because you’re already living today. I think it’s really irrelevant. But you think of it in terms of that ancient rural culture where you live basically hand-to-mouth. It becomes a daily concern, more pressing than we are accustomed to with our stocked freezers, to pray, “Give us today what we need.” So it’s praying for daily sustenance, the physical needs of life; provide for us today what we need to live today.

Now, given that Jesus instructs us to pray this, we should notice, first of all, that God then is not unconcerned with our concerns. I’ve been pressing that we should think first in terms of his concerns, but don’t take from that that somehow it is impious or less spiritual to pray about your own concerns. We have it here from our Lord himself. Pray like this: “Give us this day our daily bread.” So it’d be a false kind of piety that regards this kind of praying lightly.

In fact, you might recall at the outset of the prayer, verse 9, we’re instructed to address God as Father. And so from the get-go, we are instructed to, as we pray, to think of God—the God who rules over all, the God who is God over all things—but to think of him as our Father. Our Father who has, as a Father, a concern for our concerns. And so it is not too trite and is not more spiritual to leave out these kinds of concerns. We are invited to bring those to God in the name of Christ and to God as our Father.

And in fact—and I think this gets us closer to the heart of things here—so far from being too trite or insignificant, I think what we should take from this is that praying like this, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is, or at least ought to be, an act of worship.

That is, when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” it’s a confession of our dependence upon God for all things. The assumption here, “Give us this day our daily bread,” the assumption is that we pray out of a sense of need—not just a sense of duty, but out of a sense of dependence upon God and a recognition that God is the God of providence over every detail of our lives and that everything that we have comes to us from him. And so we look to God then in this prayer request to supply for us what we need. And I think that’s easily forgotten in our rather wealthy society comparatively. We’ve got refrigerators and freezers and pantries stuffed full of food. But here we are invited to come with an acknowledgement of God as the God who gives us all things, and an acknowledgement of our dependence upon him for all things, and so we pray: provide for us what we need to live. So in this petition, we express our daily reliance upon God for all things.

Now, this prayer is not just self-centered, and here we are not then treating God like a vending machine. Put in a prayer and out comes a blessing. Not the way it works. God is still God. He is still sovereign. He doesn’t owe us anything. We come to him recognizing our need and recognizing that we’re dependent upon him for it. And so we come humbly looking to him to provide what we need with a worshipful acknowledgement that he is God and the giver of all things. Now bear in mind the context here. We saw this in our initial lesson on this prayer. Chapter 6, verses 7 and 8: our petitions do not inform God of our needs.

He already knows that. So then why pray if God already knows it? Why ask God for something if he already knows that we need it? Well, again, I think the point is that this reminds us of our dependence upon him for the supply of the needs that we have. If God were simply to give us everything we need up front, and then that’s that, we would enjoy the gifts and we’d forget the giver. And so he invites us here to come unto him, looking for the things that we need. Yes, he knows it. He knows ahead what we need, but he wants us to acknowledge that he is the giver of things, that we are dependent upon him, so that then our request becomes an act of worship.

So the petition then, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is intended to cultivate a worshipful kind of trust in God, looking to him to supply what we need. We tend to feel, I think, very self-sufficient. We’ve got so much in the bank, and we have so much food in the pantry, and all of that, and we forget that so much of that can be erased in a moment. We forget that we are dependent upon God for the supply of everything that we need, and so he comes to us, or he invites us then to come to him and pray accordingly: worshipful sense of dependence upon God, looking to him to supply our needs.

I think it’s worth noticing—and this is often pointed out in the commentaries and so on—the plural pronoun. “Give us, this day, our daily bread.” Who’s the “our”? Who’s the “us”? When Jesus is not talking to some nuclear family, he’s speaking to the disciples. And the general consensus is that this is a petition that takes into mind our brothers and sisters in Christ. It doesn’t view us as individuals only. And so there’s an element of intercession in this, praying that God would supply for the needs of his people, not just us individually. So it views the kingdom of God as a whole. It views us as a family of God. It’s not just us individually. It’s not just our little slice of the kingdom. But it’s: Lord, provide for us, your people, what we need in order to serve you in the most effective ways. And again, we go to God with that sense of dependence upon him to provide not only for us individually, but for his people collectively.

So then, looking back over this prayer, we have progressed in our prayers from the world’s greatest cause—sanctify your name in the earth, your kingdom come, your will be done. We’ve progressed from that to the grocery cart. And that’s okay. It’s a natural progression. We’ve acknowledged our priority when we pray for God to exalt his name in the earth. We’ve acknowledged our priority of concerns for God and that his kingdom and his will and his name come first. And so we don’t pray first for our own needs, but having positioned ourselves under God and recognized his priority and positioned ourselves as dependent upon him, then finally we have situated ourselves that we can, already saying that we want to pursue his glory—your name be exalted in the earth and so on—now we have every right then to ask within that context to provide for us. And that keeps us from the trite pettiness of selfishness: “Lord, give me that Lamborghini today.” Priorities are already set. We pray for God’s interest first and we position ourselves under that.

Lessons From the Petition

All right then, what is the upshot of praying this petition? What do we learn?

Number one, we learn to trust God for all things and to look to him for every need. In the following paragraph here, verses 19 and following, Jesus will tell us of God’s fatherly care and that it should have an effect on how we think. That we shouldn’t be people marked by endless anxieties, but recognizing that God is our Father and he’ll care for us. And so here we learn to trust God and look to him to provide our needs.

And then number two, as I mentioned just briefly, and that is that we learn also to watch for one another and to pray for one another.

So then, how do we pray this prayer? Well, I think the word “bread” is pretty obvious that it is not just bread. He’s not saying you should pray for your bread but don’t pray for the salt and the pepper and the peanut butter and the jelly and the butter. But bread here is representative of your needs. So this opens up a category for us for prayer: my needs, what is it I need today? Bread, yes. Food, yes.

Often when kids, when little children, you’re teaching them to pray at the table, you’ll ask them to pray and they’ll start on: “Thank you, Lord, for mommy, and thank you for daddy, and thank you for the bread, and thank you for the butter, and thank you for the salt,” and they go on down the list. Well, here he’s given us a broad category. We don’t need to do all that, but he is categorizing for us. Pray for your needs: food, shelter, clothing, employment, peace so that you can carry out your employment, peace in the government. All of this, I think, falls under this umbrella.

Now, there is no warrant here for praying for luxuries. As I mentioned, give us today a Lamborghini and tomorrow a Jaguar or whatever. You get those luxuries, that’s great, but that’s not what he’s telling us to pray for here. He’s facing our needs. And in fact here, there’s something of a lesson of contentment. Some people have said Jesus is teaching us to pray here for our needs, not our greeds. A little play on words, I think it gets to part of the point here as well. But he is explicitly authorizing us to seek God for the necessities of life.

I think also then we learn a lesson here about anxiety. That’s the subject he takes up in the next paragraph. Don’t think like a pagan. Don’t think like an atheist. They worry about these things as though God is not their Father. You have God as your Father. You should think better. And so here it’s “pray accordingly.” Father, supply our needs. You’ve called us to live for you; supply our needs so that we can live that out in the way that you’ve called us.

With this petition, then, we bring to the Lord all the things that concern us. We worshipfully acknowledge our dependence upon him, and we look to him to provide the needs themselves and the enablement to live for him. And so this prayer teaches us to live to view our lives as under God’s care. Start off “Father in heaven,” acknowledge the priority of his interests, and then we move on to our own, still acknowledging him as Father: provide for us what we need. That with a firm recognition of his providence over all things, we speak to God accordingly: provide for us what we need to live for you.